Terror: Proposal
Terrorism has been a salient topic since the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City’s World Trade Center. This terrorist act has altered the security landscape and prompted governments to increase their efforts in tackling the threat of global terrorism. Acts of terrorism have since become more frequent, with the formation of certain terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda. Even with heavy investments in efforts to eradicate the threat, terrorism remains prevalent, with an ever-increasing threat to our lives. As such, we turn to analyse past data on terrorism to draw insights and potentially identify patterns behind terrorist acts, so that governments can be better able to combat terrorism.
Main objectives that we hope to achieve through this project:
- Gain overall insight on the frequency, spread and rate of global terrorism acts over a time period.
- Identify and better understand any patterns and trends of global terrorism acts among regions.
- Identify possible main factors that might lead to terrorist acts.
- Identify any possible linkages, implications or impacts from terrorist acts.
- How global terrorism is affected by various factors.
The terrorism dataset contains terrorist acts from all over the world across a span of 47 years from 1970 to 2017. It contains 135 columns and 181,691 rows. Each row represents a terrorist act and each column describes the characteristics/features of a terrorist act.
In our analysis, we will only include terrorism data from the year 2002 to 2017. The purpose of choosing the selected data are as follows: September 11 attacks brought the seriousness of terrorism in today’s societal context and hence we use 2002 as the starting year of our analysis as it is the year that starts after the September 11 attacks which served as a trigger point. With rapid transformation due to globalisation and technology advancement, a range of 16 years will be acceptable to analyse the trends and patterns in the terrorist attacks. Furthermore, the terrorism data is from 1970 to 2017 which is not strong to provide analysis and insights for that past 47 years to predict terrorist attacks now or in the future as terrorist organisations changes too. Moreover, the data collected on each country’s development status is from 1987 to 2018 and the development status for the countries has fluctuations too due to the rapid transformation in this globalised world. Due to limitations of the data collected on each country's governance indicators, the dataset only provides information from year 1996 to 2017 and there are missing data from year 1997, 1999, and 2001.
Secondary data sets:
